Various products including hard disk drives utilize a read channel device to retrieve information from a medium and to detect and decode the values of the data originally written to the medium. Such read channel devices may include data processing circuits including a data detector circuit and a data decoder circuit. The ability to detect the original stored data patterns in the received data samples from the analog to digital converter is important to the accurate transfer of data. Data decoder circuits can be binary or non-binary. A non-binary low density parity check code is an example of an encoding algorithm that is significantly improved over binary low density parity check codes, although a non-binary low density parity check decoder has a relatively high complexity. Similarly, non-binary data detector circuits such as symbol-based Bahl-Cocke-Jalinek-Raviv (BCJR) detectors have a relatively high computational complexity in comparison with binary data detector circuits.